The Story of the Cannibal Woman

SEVEN

Rosélie, who didn’t have Dido’s culinary talents, was finishing a meager meal when the bell at the front gate rang. Slightly alarmed, she sat up. Who could that possibly be? She wasn’t expecting anyone, since she had no friends and therefore no visitors. In some neighborhoods the gangs worked brazenly in broad daylight. Fake movers would empty a house from the cellar to the attic, then neatly liquidate the owners. But they wouldn’t ring to announce their arrival, she reasoned.

She cautiously approached, and was so amazed when she saw him standing on the sidewalk, his face pressed up against the gate like an Arab hawking rugs, that she lost all sense of civility and shouted at him:

“What are you doing here? I don’t work on Sundays.”

He smiled, by no means deterred.

“It’s not that. I wanted to see you, Rosélie.”

He had called her by her name. Even worse, however, no sooner had he said it than she realized the wish was mutual. These past days, this incongruous, inadmissible desire had lain hidden behind the bitterness, the grief, and the anxiety of daily routine. Her fingers, turned strangely numb, finally managed to find the key. She stepped aside to let him in and pointed to the chairs in the garden.

“Shall we sit outside?”

But he preferred to go in. Inside, while he looked her over with a critical eye, she was angry with herself for wearing a battered pair of corduroy trousers, a sweater with holes at the elbows, and no makeup. What man in his right senses could possibly be interested in her?

“You shouldn’t stay locked up at home in this fine weather,” he remarked. “Look at that sun! You ought to get out and—”

“—and enjoy myself, thank you, I’ve done that,” she said, finishing his sentence in a gloomy mocking tone of voice.

She stood powerless while he seized her hand and covered it with kisses.

“Forgive me once again for last time. I don’t know what came over me, I had the urge to hurt you. I suppose I was jealous.”

Hold on! Where is this leading us?

In order to conduct an extramarital affair with all the lies, pretense, and hypocrisy it entails, you need a morale of iron that Rosélie didn’t have. After drifting into troubled waters, sinking, and almost drowning during her terrifying days, at night she liked to come back to the firm, reassuring pontoon of Stephen’s body anchored in the same place. Lovemaking was no longer a physical, bodily struggle from which they emerged exhausted and sweating. It was a pleasant, uneventful stroll in a familiar garden. Afterward, Stephen would uncork a bottle of Italian white wine, Lacrima Christi, read comic strips out loud, and dream of Yeats. Beneath her closed eyelids she could see Rose again, even hear her:

Amado mío,

Love me forever

And let forever begin tonight.

In twenty years she had had only one affair, only one, and the memory of it tucked away, far away, in the corner of her mind, had lost all reality. Had she really lived the madness of those days? Yet, three months after the death of her companion, here was a man whom she didn’t know from Adam, a man she dominated by at least six inches, who was turning her on. She was not proud of it. At the same time, she was deeply distraught, experiencing such sensations and feelings, so long forgotten that she thought she had never felt them. Her life was not over, then?

“Let me take you out to Clifton,” he proposed. “I know a place where they serve mussels and Mort Subite beer. It’s just like being in Brussels.”

If it was just to have a drink, she had gallons of white wine. Every week Dido brought back crates from Lievland. In the kitchen she almost broke two glasses and cut herself opening a bottle, she was so nervous. When she came back into the living room he was standing in front of one of her paintings. Turning round, he asked her the inevitable question.

“What does that represent?”

She smiled. “Whatever you like.”

He seemed disconcerted, repeating:

“Whatever I like?”

Then he laughed, revealing his uneven, square teeth. He came toward her, took both glasses from her hands, and set them down on a piece of furniture, as if he had wasted enough time with words, gestures, and smiles and now needed to get down to essentials. They made love with the frenzy of two high school students on the living room’s dark red sofa.

Afterward, Rosélie was shattered. Years of fidelity wiped out in a single morning! Her fidelity had nothing binding about it. Stephen had never presented her with a parchment to sign:

Commandment No. 10: “Thou shalt covet no one but me.” It was the fruit of a personal decision.

He jumped up, for, like Stephen, he seemed to possess that quality that was so cruelly lacking in her: he was at ease with himself, satisfied at being who he was.

“Get dressed!” he ordered with the authority conferred on him by the pleasure he had just given her. “I’m taking you to a club in the Malay district where they play music from Zaire.”

“Music from Zaire?” she said, pulling a face.

“Well, from the Congo, since Zaire no longer exists.”

Seeing little enthusiasm, he smiled.

“You must reintegrate; you’ve lived too long among white folk.”

But this time he was joking.

Rosélie had been sleeping like she hadn’t slept for three months when Dido entered with her tray and aroma of coffee. It was late. The sun’s rays had filtered into the very middle of the bedroom. Dido had travestied herself as a domestic — headscarf, colorless blouse — but as usual sat down intimately on the bed as if she were at home. That morning she made no comments about the newspapers and announced in an excited voice:

“I have to go back to Lievland. Sofie called. Jan has just died.”

But Rosélie no longer had time for Jan. She recounted the night’s events. Dido listened without interrupting and first of all said by way of conclusion:

“It’s done you a world of good. You were able to sleep. You look ten years younger.”

But her approval was short-lived. She went and fetched a sheet of paper and sat down in front of the chest of drawers.

“Now let’s see what type of person he is,” she said severely.

“What type?”

Rosélie realized that she knew nothing about a man with whom she had performed one of the most secret and intimate acts imaginable.

Dido licked the end of her pencil.

“He took you out? Where did he take you?”

“To the Paradise,” she said docilely. “In the Malay district.”

The Bo-Kaap or Malay district, as the inhabitants of Cape Town call this fascinating and charming enclave of ocher, pink, and blue facades, is in fact a misnomer. Historians tell us that fewer than one percent of slaves actually came from Malaysia and, consequently, have left few traces in the region. They also call it the Muslim district. This seems more appropriate given the number of mosques in the area. Moreover, a religious leader by the name of Abu Bakr Effendi lived and founded a school there. Malay or Muslim, Bo-Kaap is one of the nicest areas of Cape Town because of its tangled network of alleys, its tiny restaurants smelling of ginger and curry; and it is also one of the safest, the only neighborhood in this city of living dangerously where you can stroll around on foot.

Dido pulled a face.

“He didn’t go to much trouble. The Paradise is a very ordinary sort of place. Admission is a few rand. The club belongs to a Congolese refugee. It’s where all the French-speaking Africans hang out.”

In his eyes, I don’t deserve any better. I’m not a prize conquest.

“At his age, he must have a wife and children. Where are they?”

Rosélie nodded.

“He’s married to an African-American,” she replied naturally, hiding how stunned she had been on hearing the news. (So he had a liking for foreign women.) “They have two daughters. When he lost his job, his wife went back to her family. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

Dido rolled her eyes.

“The usual story! They’ve always quarreled with their wives. Always separated or in the process of divorce. What’s he doing in South Africa?”

Rosélie made a vague gesture.

“Like everyone else. He came to do business.”

“My God!” Dido groaned. “The worst kind. The so-called African businessman. In that case, why isn’t he in Johannesburg? That’s where the business is!”

Rosélie confessed she didn’t know. Dido continued her interrogation.

“I’ve heard he’s a government minister?”

“He didn’t mention it,” Rosélie once again confessed.

“Then he can’t be too proud of it,” Dido concluded in a cutting tone. “Why does he drag around all those bodyguards with him?”

“It seems his enemies tried to assassinate him while he was living in Kinshasa, then again in Brazzaville.”

Dido sniffed scornfully on hearing this story of hired killers. At that moment, Rosélie endeavored to reassure her and adopted a casual approach. What was she frightened of? What was she trying to protect her from? Whatever people might think, she wasn’t born yesterday. The heart had nothing to do with it. Just a one-night stand, that’s all it was. Dido put her harshly in her place.

“I’ve already heard that tune. You’re wrong, women can’t divorce sex from the heart. You least of all.”

Thereupon she stuffed her paper in a drawer.

“Don’t trust him. That Faustin tells me there’s nothing good about him.”

She sounded like Dominique ranting on against Stephen years earlier. Dido didn’t like Stephen either, even though she hadn’t dared admit it. At times Rosélie caught her looking at him, black with animosity. Good friends are always Cassandras.

Rosélie got dressed, then went downstairs to drink three cups of coffee on the patio. She needed at least that to regain a semblance of equilibrium.

On the other side of the street, her hands protected by pink rubber gloves, her face behind a blue mica eyeshade, Mrs. Schipper, the neighbor, was trimming her roses. Snip snip snip. The branches fell around her like heads during the Reign of Terror. As usual, she looked straight through Rosélie. This voluntary blindness had lasted four years.

The night with Faustin gave Rosélie the courage she had lacked up till then. She pushed open the door to Stephen’s lair. It was an oval room, “my oval office,” Stephen liked to joke, the loveliest room in the house, evidently designed to be a living room, as the marquetry and moldings on the ceiling testified. His favorite picture, the third of a series he had named Virgins, Monsters, and Witches, had pride of place. Stephen’s den was filled with an ill-assorted collection of furniture, the way he liked it, an armchair bought for next to nothing at the flea market standing next to an expensive roll desk in lemon wood. Stephen was very proud of his library filled with leather-bound first editions in French and English. What was she going to do with them, she who hated the opaque, oppressive presence of books? She decided to donate them to the university. She would call Doris the very next morning. Dido would love the extra flat, wide-screen Sony TV — Stephen adored the latest gadgets — which would set Keanu Reeves off to better advantage. As for the CD player, Deogratias, who was a lover of Gregorian chant, would be overjoyed with it. But all those CDs and videocassettes? Stephen’s taste in music was totally opposite to hers, strictly jazz and Verdi operas, which she hated. She would give everything to Mrs. Hillster. Mrs. Hillster was a great friend of Stephen’s. Twice or three times a week she would come and have tea, and sit and chat with him at the foot of the traveler’s tree. Mrs. Hillster was an English lady, the widow of a senior civil servant who in the seventies had written a report, oh nothing too critical, against apartheid. This gave her the right to criticize the government and to fill everybody’s head with “All they have to do is this” or “All they have to do is that.”

Apart from that, she owned the most delightful shop imaginable, called the Threepenny Opera. Everything was shelved together in total disorder: Christmas carols with requiems, motets with oratorios, cello suites with raï music, and Cesaria Evora with Cheb Mami. Rummaging around, you came up with all sorts of things. That’s how more than once Rosélie’s heart had missed a beat. One day, in the middle of a collection of iscathamiya music, she had come across some old recordings of biguines by Stellio: Elie’s favorite music, together with the Afro-Cubans. “Guantanamera,” “Dos gardenias,” and “tutti quanti.” In his youth Elie had even tried his lips at clarinet playing. Together with his four brothers, Emeric, Eliacin, Evrard, and Emile, they had formed a group called the Musical Brothers. The band had made quite a name for itself playing at afternoon dances and quadrille balls. But in the long run music is not enough to feed a man on his own, let alone four strapping guys. The band had broken up. Whereas his brothers found jobs wherever they could — two emigrated to Paris, another to Canada — the valiant Elie sat for the civil service exam and spent the next forty years in a stuffy office on the second floor of the clerk’s office in Pointe-à-Pitre. Another time Rosélie had discovered Salama Salama’s gold record, The Reggae of the Wretched, that had sold over a million copies and whose music had no trouble feeding him comfortably. She had helped him compose the lyrics.

Dance, the wretched of the earth,

Dance, the prisoners of hunger,

Yes, dance, dance, dance to forget!

Me rasta man, I urge you to love one another.

If everyone loved each other

Loved each other in the morning, loved each other in the evening,

Loved each other at noon, loved each other at midnight,

The world would be a better place.

Her cheeks were still burning.

A young Nepalese, Bishupal Limbu, reigned over the Threepenny Opera. One customer would ask for the Concerto for Violin by Alan Berg, another for Legend by Bob Marley, and some woman the Requiem by Gilles. Despite the surrounding jumble, Bishupal would head straight for the recording. His musical knowledge was surprising. His literary knowledge too. During his rare spare moments, he always had his nose stuck in a book. He often came to Faure Street to borrow a book from Stephen. In three months he had read the complete works of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy and had begun to tackle William Faulkner. Taciturn and looking ill at ease, a fringe of jet-black hair caressing his slit eyes, he dreamed of becoming a poet. His poetry had been published in a journal in Johannesburg. Stephen had convinced him to take a correspondence course to prepare for English composition exams.

“To give him some basics. He massacres the English language and thinks his grammatical mistakes are poetic license.”

Mrs. Hillster considered him a genius, pinning his poems to the shop walls, and treated him like a son and an exotic curio. But it so happened that one lunchtime while he was out, two masked boys stormed in and, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, emptied the contents of a safe stuffed with rand, pounds sterling, and dollars that Mrs. Hillster kept in the shop out of her distrust of banks. For good measure, they had given the poor woman a thorough beating when she tried to intervene. They hadn’t broken into the safe, so Bishupal, who knew both its contents and combination, was assumed to be an obvious accomplice. The police had therefore arrested him. But they were unable to prove a thing. Witnesses had seen him at the time these sad events had come to pass with his nose in As I Lay Dying, sitting at a table in the Pizzeria Napoletana. On her hospital bed, despite a jaw out of joint, broken ribs, and contusions, Mrs. Hillster swore he was innocent. According to her, Bishupal wouldn’t hurt a fly. This incident had occurred a few days after Stephen’s death, at a time when Rosélie had only her own misfortunes on her mind. To make a donation, even belatedly, of over two hundred CDs would be an excellent way of begging forgiveness.

She sat down behind the desk and stared at the murky eye of the computer. There was something troubling to the thought that now that Stephen was gone, the computer stored everything that had preoccupied him. All she need do to penetrate this artificial brain was press a few keys. Yet this would be a sacrilege. Without hesitating, she decided to destroy its memory and then donate the computer, a shell drained of its substance, to the Steve Biko High School. During the funeral a delegation of students and teachers had carried a wreath. Chris Nkosi, who had played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had read in tears one of his own poems. Without thinking, she tried to open the drawers. Locked except for two of them. The first was filled with those odds and ends you accumulate throughout life: business cards for people you will never do business with, blue erasable Waterman cartridges, matchbooks advertising Café Milano, Café Lalo, Café Mozart, felt-tip pens of every color, staplers without staples, and a small Chinese compass pointing feverishly toward the northeast. There was nothing worth keeping. Rosélie pulled the wastepaper basket toward her, and it was then she saw it, the cell phone they thought was lost. Nestling against one of the desk’s legs, half hidden under the jute rug. A tiny, very expensive object, just a few inches wide, folded into its black leather case. She flipped it open and pressed a key and it lit up, evil-looking and green, like an emerald in the palm of her hand.

It’s Inspector Lewis Sithole who will be happy.

In the other drawer there was a pile of photo albums. She opened one haphazardly. On the first page four people were smiling at the camera. Or rather three people were smiling at the camera, she was standing to one side, aloof and sulky. She turned the photo over: Lone Pine—1994—With Lisa and Richard — Memorable Stay. Stephen had underlined the last two words. The memorable stay fluttered, at first vague and uncertain in her memory, then settled motionless. She remembered. They had taken advantage of one of Stephen’s leaves to visit Death Valley in California. After driving for several hours, they had arrived at a small town whose name foreshadowed what it had to offer. Lone Pine. A few houses huddled along a main street. A fast-food restaurant where individuals with faces of America’s most wanted were swallowing platefuls of carbohydrates. A gas station where enormous trucks had come to a halt. Around a trailer park garlands of jeans, checkered shirts, and children’s sleepsuits were fluttering in the breeze. All the moroseness of Middle America was gathered there. Plus something else, something frightening. It was as if the bestiality of the inhabitants hidden behind these commonplace facades, like an ogre in his lair, would pounce at the slightest pretext. The guidebook had graced the Beaver Inn with three stars even so. Going down to join Stephen at the bar, she saw him in deep conversation with a couple. Around forty. The woman: blond, smartly dressed, and pretty. The man: slightly overfed, a mop of hair, and a pleasant face. As she walked over, they watched her behind their what-a-wonderful-world smiles, switched on for the occasion, with a mixture of aloofness and anxiety. What was this black woman doing walking straight toward them? She reached the table, and it was then that Stephen introduced her, drawing her close with a possessive hug.

“My wife, Rosélie.”

Every time, he never failed! She complained he was playing the conjurer pulling a lugubrious and surprising object out of his hat. In front of his colleagues, his acquaintances, the neighborhood shopkeepers, the newspaper seller, the cigarette merchant, and the florist. She would force a muttered greeting. Every time, the other person would strain their ears, on high alert. In her mouth the French accent that conjured up pell-mell Gay Paree, Chanel suits, Christian Dior, Must de Cartier, and the white lace of the French cancan sounded like an insufferable parody.

You mean to say you’re French?

Oh no! I’m from Guadeloupe!

Where’s that?

My God, what a mix-up!

She suspected Stephen of reveling in the reactions his introduction produced. Remembering them in bed was his life buoy against their sexual shipwreck. Clinging to these memories gave a kick to an exercise that in the long run could have ended up as a routine and endowed it with a taste for the taboo, even perversity or vice.

Lisa and Richard stood up like robots and awkwardly held out their hands.

The unexpected thing about America is that you can live there for years without meeting the natives. Nor even speaking their language. Rosélie had ended up learning English, but not without difficulty. But since she didn’t have an outside job, the only Americans she knew were Stephen’s colleagues. When they came for dinner at Riverside Drive, their conversation revolved around literature or politics, subjects that were foreign to her.

“What are you interested in?” Stephen would ask mockingly after every one of those dinners. “Next time we’ll do our best to please you.”

What am I interested in? Me, me, nothing but me.

In fact, besides Linda, the only people she spoke to were the day porter, a Pakistani in a dark blue uniform; the night porter, a Bulgarian in a brown uniform; and the security patrolmen in their light blue uniforms with gilded facings, swaggering along the neighborhood streets, all of them Latinos.

Lisa and Richard went far beyond her wildest imagination. Richard was a lawyer. Lisa worked for a television station. They were parents of three sons. Both divorced, they each had three daughters from their previous marriages. They didn’t spare one detail recounting their first marriages, the tribulations of their divorces, the trouble with their parents, their quarrels with their in-laws, the problems with their children, their rivalry with brothers and sisters, their marital difficulties, their sexual boredom, the failed orgies, the successful affairs, and their futile sessions with their shrink, who, nevertheless, had cured Hillary Clinton of her depression. This outpouring was especially painful, as it was directed solely at Stephen. Products of centuries of racism and exclusion of blacks, Lisa and Richard were incapable of looking at Rosélie in the eye and treating her like any other human being. At the most they managed to grimace an inane smile, by half turning in her direction. In fact, Rosélie, used to invisibility, could have put up with it if she had been deaf as well. On day four, while Lisa and Richard were giving endless descriptions of their trip to Tuscany and their futile efforts to get the dark, curly-haired Italian gardener into bed with them, she couldn’t take it any longer and fled. A taxi drove her to the Los Angeles Sheraton, from where she called Stephen. He soon joined her. She was waiting for him with some very precise questions. What enjoyment did he get from such company? Did he care about the ordeal it meant for her? Instead of giving an answer, he made love to her with unusual violence, gagging her with kisses.

“You don’t know how to have fun,” he complained yet again.

Have fun? Was that having fun? They didn’t share the same sense of humor.

Back in New York, Stephen invited Lisa and Richard to one of his dinners. But at the last minute they canceled with a lame excuse and were never seen again.

Rosélie also gathered enough strength to climb up to her studio, open the windows, and gaze at her paintings. Since Stephen had gone she hadn’t touched her brushes. Since the officiant was no longer there for the naming ceremonies, she no longer gave birth.

Oddly enough, in Cape Town she had sold a fair number of paintings. All it took was for Mrs. Hillster, while on a visit to her studio in the company of Stephen, now the official guide, to enthuse over Devils, She-Devils, and Zombies and buy it for her shop; as a result, a number of customers had made the detour to Faure Street to be the first to own a painting by this genius, who was still totally unknown but destined in the more or less long term for the spotlight of celebrity, as Mrs. Hillster declared, duly coached. Since South Africa was a cauldron where all the world’s nationalities were cooking, the Germans, Norwegians, Swiss, Indians, and the Mexicans, who remarked learnedly on the similarities with their very own Frida Kahlo — the blood, the entrails, the physical suffering — left with their treasures under their arm, looking very pleased with themselves.

Dido thought along the same lines as Simone.

“You know Bebe Sephuma. Couldn’t she give a helping hand? That’s what you need!”

How could she explain that Bebe Sephuma was not interested in her? Not glamorous enough for a magazine cover! Too awkward and self-conscious! And then she wasn’t English-speaking. People who speak English feel a deep contempt for the rest of the world. The time is long gone when French was considered the language of culture. For serious minds it now seems nothing more than frivolous gibberish.

Once again she was seized with doubt. What were the fruits of her labor worth? As long as she was busy choosing, then mixing the colors, applying the paint with long or short brush strokes, savoring its vivifying smell, her eyes were fixed on this white square of canvas that her imagination slowly peopled and transformed. She heard nothing except for the hum of the outside world that mellowed inside her. She was inhabited by a happiness, no doubt comparable with that of a woman whose fetus moves in the very depths of her flesh. However, once she had lost her waters and given birth, she detached herself from her creation. Worse, she took a sudden dislike to it, like a cruel mother who dreams of throwing her newborn in a garbage dump, wrapped in a plastic bag. So why did she go on painting? Because she couldn’t do otherwise.

But God in his mysterious ways had perhaps put an end to her agony. Now that Stephen was gone, she was no longer anything at all. A masseuse, a medium, a curandera, call it what you like.

“Rosélie Thibaudin, healer of incurable cases.”

At the same time, illogically, the loss of her gift was destroying her.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.